Accidentally Yours Chapter 96

**Lola**

The world tilted, sloshed, came back in shards.

Fluorescent lights, too bright. The antiseptic sting of alcohol. Rubber-gloved hands pressing, pulling, stitching.

Pain carved her open, white-hot and merciless. She tried to shift but her body screamed in protest, every rib grinding like broken glass. Something sharp burned down her side where the shrapnel had kissed her, a deep gouge that wouldn’t stop bleeding.

“Hold her down—” a voice barked.

“I’m trying—”

Her limbs jerked without her say-so, twitching against straps she hadn’t even noticed until now. Fuck. Strapped down like a bug on a table.

Her throat rasped, a dry laugh trying to crawl up but choking halfway. “Don’t… don’t manhandle me on the first date.”

One of the nurses startled. Another muttered, “Christ, how is she joking?”

They didn’t get it. She’d always fought pain with teeth.

Her vision blurred, cleared again, blurred. Shapes bent overhead, faces she couldn’t pin down. She caught fragments: blood loss, pulmonary contusion, concussion.

Her brain tried to keep count of the damage but the list kept slipping through her fingers.

She thought of Enzo. The way he scowled when she mouthed off. The way he kissed her like he could fuse them together. She wanted that anchor now. Wanted his voice, his hands, the weight of him. Anything but this cold table and the sound of machines screaming.

Her lips cracked into a smile anyway, blood drying sticky across her cheek. “Bet I look hot right now.”

A nurse cursed. Another muttered, “How the hell is she alive after that blast?”

She clung to that. ***Alive***.

**Enzo**

Twenty-four hours without Lola and Enzo was unraveling.

Not in silence, not in stillness—no, he didn’t have that luxury. He was out in it. In the smoke. In the blood. His fists bruised, his knuckles raw, his shirt stiff with someone else’s mess.

The Russians had been his first stop. Volkov’s warehouses, his shipments, his men. Enzo had stormed through them like a plague. Interrogations were fast and brutal—every word dragged out of mouths with the back of his hand, with the barrel of a gun pressed too deep into bone.

“You’ve got her? You touch her?”

Blank stares. Bloodied lips. Denials.

Not good enough.

Another one hit the floor, coughing red, babbling about how the Russians had no reason to cross him right now, how they’d never lay hands on a woman who belonged to Enzo Maraschi. Enzo left him with broken teeth anyway.

Because denials didn’t give him Lola.

The hangar had become a revolving door—Jake and his hackers spitting out movements and chatter, Gino running comms, Dom sent home to rest though he’d fought him on it. Nico, concussed and pale, had dragged himself back despite orders to stay down.

But Enzo wasn’t standing idle in the war room. He was in the field, where Lola might actually be.

He hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. His body begged for it, his hands shook, his vision swam at the edges—but the rage kept him upright. The thought of her—small, smart, sharp-mouthed Lola—kept him moving.

She’d been blown up. Maybe broken. Maybe bleeding out somewhere, alone. His chest split every time he pictured it.

She can’t be dead. I’d know. I’d feel it.

That mantra was the only thread keeping him tethered.

Gino shadowed him through the streets, steady where Enzo was chaos, barking orders at the men trailing behind them. They hit a club on the east side, one of the Russians’ fronts. Kicked the doors in. Dragged every man inside into the alley, lined them up against the wall.

“Where is she?” Enzo demanded, voice low enough to terrify.

One of them stammered something about shipments, about not knowing. Enzo pressed the muzzle of his gun under the man’s jaw until he cried, swore, begged—but nothing.

Nothing but wasted time.

He shoved the man aside and went down the line, eyes burning, fists swinging. By the end, three men were moaning on the ground, and one had been dragged off by Enzo’s crew for a longer conversation in a darker room.

Still no Lola.

Hours bled together, the city spinning under his boots—warehouse, alley, bar, safehouse. At every stop: no answers. Just more bodies left behind.

By the time he made it back to the hangar, he was unrecognizable even to himself. Sweat plastered his shirt to his chest, blood streaked down his arms, his lip split and swelling. His men went quiet when he walked in, eyes dropping, because they’d never seen him like this.

Jake looked up from his bank of screens, face pale under the glow. “We’ve traced Russian chatter—they’re rattled. Swearing up and down they didn’t take her. But…” His fingers flew across keys, pulling up a second feed. “There’s movement from Bellandi’s crew, too. Not just territory flexing. Strategic. Tight. Like they’re covering something.”

Enzo stilled. His jaw flexed.

***Bellandi***.

The name alone was a blade in his chest.

If it was Rafael Bellandi—if his hands were anywhere near Lola—then tonight would mark the start of a war Vegas hadn’t seen in a generation.

Enzo leaned over the maps, palms braced on the steel. His reflection stared back in the glossy surface—eyes red, jaw bloodied, a man clawing against the edge of breaking.

“She’s out there,” he rasped, voice cracking like thunder. “No body means alive. Alive means findable. And if Bellandi’s crew so much as breathed on her…” His throat locked, teeth grinding. “I’ll make them choke on it.”

The room was silent but for the hum of servers, the click of keys.

Inside, his mind looped the same litany: She can’t be dead. She can’t be dead. She can’t be dead.

He forced air in, out. Forced his voice steady. “We keep burning through the Russians. Every warehouse, every shipment, every front they’ve got. Then we move to Bellandi’s. We don’t stop. Not until she’s back in my arms.”

He straightened, blood drying stiff on his knuckles, chest aching with every breath.

Hold it together. Don’t break. Not until she’s safe.

**Rafael**

Rafael leaned back against the sterile wall, dark shirt pressed, jacket crisp. Still, he swore he could feel the weight of her blood in his hands, soaking through to his skin, no matter how many times he’d scrubbed it off. The memory clung, sticky and relentless, refusing to wash away.

The monitors hummed soft in the dim light, steady beeps marking the proof she was still here. Lola lay pale against white sheets, silver hair spilling across the pillow, machines tethered to her like lifelines. Not fragile—never that—but thinner now, as though the blast had carved something out of her.

He’d read the doctors’ reports already. Internal bleeding stopped. A concussion. Shrapnel stitched. Burns along her side and arm. Not fatal—barely—but only because luck or fate or whatever devil watched over her refused to let go. She should have died twice over. She hadn’t.

He studied her face, every sharp angle of it. The woman who’d tattooed him at the expo with a tongue as sharp as her needle, throwing out facts about squid nerve bundles like it was small talk. The fiancée of Enzo Maraschi, claimed but not contained. The girl bleeding across his lap, lips still curved like she’d won the last word. The stripper the Russians called Cinnamon, dancing like sin under lights that should’ve burned her alive.

***Too many lives. Too many masks.***

His investigators hadn’t made sense of her either. The report was a patchwork of contradictions:

– Certified stunt driver.

– Fluent in Italian, Mandarin, Spanish, Russian—hell, even a line item noting she’d once studied a “constructed language” of elves.

– Passed the bar exam in two states but never practiced.

– Martial arts trained to a tournament level yet never competed.

– Crab boat crew in the Bering Sea one brutal summer.

– Bartender in the Keys for nearly a year.

– Pianist in New York for a season.

And buried in it all, a single note: missing since the age of nine, reported as Lolana Witmore. Parents bankrupt soon after, fortune gone, case still open.

A phantom wrapped in fire. Too slippery to pin, too wild to cage.

Rafael exhaled slowly, the sound more like a growl. Was this her? Or was this Enzo, playing her like a piece on the board? Using her to slip inside places men like him couldn’t? He didn’t know. And he hated not knowing.

He stepped closer to her bedside, fingers brushing against the edge of the sheet. Her hand lay slack against the white cotton, bandaged and bruised, but bare now where the ring had been. Heavy, pink, heart-cut—the mark of belonging. He’d taken it, slid it from her finger himself. Not because he wanted it, but because it told him everything about what she was to Enzo, and what that made her to him.

Her lashes flickered once, almost waking, and he froze. But no—her chest rose steady, her breath even. Still under. Still caught in that place between fire and shadow.

***Good***.

He leaned down, voice pitched low enough for only her and the machines to hear.

“Sleep now. Next time I walk through that door, I’ll know exactly what to do with you, Selvaggia (wild one) .”

He straightened, jaw set, and turned for the door.

But the weight in his pocket, the memory of her lips curving even while half-dead, and the storm she dragged into every room she entered followed him out into the night.